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Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters leave the outskirts of Suruc, Turkey, towards the Turkey-Syria border, on the way to the Syrian city of Kobani, Friday, Oct. 31, 2014. The 10 peshmerga fighters from Iraq who entered the embattled northern Syrian town of Kobani one day earlier returned to Turkey Friday to prepare for their forces' full deployment, and a senior Kurdish official blamed Ankara for the delay. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

WASHINGTON There is finally some good news from Iraq that the Obama administration ought to celebrate. Unfortunately, the O-Team at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. (and their fellow travelers in the so-called mainstream media) appears to be oblivious to whats really happening on the ground in Mesopotamia.

For the potentates of the press, the gruesome struggle for Kobani, just a few hundred yards from the Syria-Turkey border, is all that matters. The visuals of less than 200 Iraqi Kurds transiting Turkish territory to reinforce their kinsmen in a desperate house-to-house battle against 5,000 ISIS fighters and the occasional detonation of air-dropped munitions in the frontier city have become The Story. According to Official Spokesmen and unnamed Senior Officials at the White House and the Pentagon, these events are signs of important progress in the effort to destroy ISIS.

Hogwash. The sanguinary contest in Kobani is a distraction in military parlance, a diversion created by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed Sunni Caliph of the Islamic State and his military planners once officers in Saddam Husseins Republican Guards. The real fight for the future of the entire region is taking place within the ethnically diverse provinces of Nineveh and Anbar in northern and western Iraq.

The population centers in these provinces, Mosul (Iraqs second largest city), Fallujah, Ramadi, Haditha and al-Qaim were all targeted by ISIS. They are not only places where U.S. Marines, Soldiers and SEALs won vicious battles; they are also where we found our best allies during The Awakening in 2006-07 that led to victory in 2008.

Thats not political spin. I know. Our Fox News "War Stories" team was there for all of it. Regrettably, the sacrifice of so much American blood and treasure was squandered during what our troops call, The Obama Bug Out when our commander-in-chief ordered all U.S. forces out of Iraq in December 2011.

Do not despair. Heres the good news all but ignored by the international press corps and those who are comatose in official Washington: The Sunni tribes in northern and western Iraq our friends in the middle of the last decade can once again be the lynchpin for defeating ISIS in this decade.

A new Awakening is now under way that may well be far more effective than pin prick coalition airstrikes. Militarily it will have to be different than the campaign in 2006-2007 when small cells of Al Qaeda in Iraq were defeated by superior firepower and well coordinated operations by U.S. forces and our allies.

Today the situation is reversed. There are no U.S. boots on the ground and ISIS is better organized, supplied and led than the Iraqi Army or the Sunni tribal militias. Last month the Albu Namir tribe tried to fight back against ISIS. When they ran out of ammunition, ISIS slaughtered more than 250 fighters and an untold number of civilians. Simply arming the tribes in Anbar to fight ISIS separately would condemn them to extinction.

At this very moment, however, while news and diplomatic elites are diverted by whats happening in Kobani, a conference of reasonable, moderate, anti-ISIS Sunnis is being organized in Irbil, Iraq. Instigated by Mudhar Shawkat, a successful Sunni businessman and a leader of the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Movement, the conference, to be convened later this year, will aim to create an umbrella organization of Iraqi Sunnis to defeat ISIS.

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OPINION: OLIVER NORTH The good news from Iraq that nobody knows